


echoes

by SkadizzleRoss



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Android Tina Chen, Failed Android Revolution (Detroit: Become Human), Human Connor (Detroit: Become Human), Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mentioned Tina Chen, Smut, reverse au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:26:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23533777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkadizzleRoss/pseuds/SkadizzleRoss
Summary: All Tina said was,Keep an eye on him, alright? He doesn’t leave this room.He’d been out a leg and half an arm; hadn’t evenbooted upfor a solid two days. Connor came home from work and the android was sitting on the couch, staring at him with two-toned eyes.---Rookie cop Connor and former revolutionary leader Markus seek out a little mutual comfort in the wake of a failed android uprising.
Relationships: Connor/Markus (Detroit: Become Human)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 117





	echoes

Connor blinks up at a sky smudged with clouds, underlit by the city lights.

There’s mud squelching under his collar and the dull promise of future bruises painted down his side, but it’s the pain in his arm that has him choking on his first attempt at an inhale.

He forces one breath, then two. Squeezes his eyes shut and breathes in sips until the shock passes. He listens for the asshole that threw him down here, but there’s nothing. Just the ticking, settling sound of the junkyard around him.

It’d been an android. A functional one. Another wayward visitor, he thinks, scavenging for parts. Just trying to survive. He can’t begrudge it that.

Still. He would’ve preferred not to get thrown at all.

He tastes blood, but a quick swipe of his tongue tells him it’s just a split lip. The pain’s narrowing down to his elbow now. A throbbing point of heat, something feeling _wrong_ , too tight.

He’s trying to run a mud-slick hand over his sleeve when he feels something slick grasping his ankle. He spasms back and lashes out with his boot, but the chassis he kicks away is long dead, the skull making a hollow _thock_ under his heel. The jostling lights his arm up, makes him bite back a low moan.

He goes back to his blind exploration; finds a knob of pain above his elbow that he’s too afraid to touch again, and tries not to wonder if the wet heat is mud or blood or both.

Connor doesn’t know if it’s broken. He doesn’t want to know. His hand still opens and closes, that has to be good enough. He curls up in the valley of dead androids he’s fallen into, clutching the bag to his chest and feeling around to make sure none of the components inside are cracked. His glasses are still functional, which is a good thing. The forensics tech he’d borrowed them from would likely charge double in interest.

There’s one more part still blinking on the list. #z1842. He cranes his neck, letting the heads-up display scan through the piles of bone-white plastisteel.

Thousands and thousands of them. So much scrap, now.

He wonders how long it will take CyberLife to convince Congress their products are safe again. How long it’ll be before they’re emptying these junkyards out, piecing their discarded horrors back together again.

The HUD blinks, narrowing on the half-buried cradle of an arm assembly. Connor waits a few beats more, listening to make sure the android scavenger’s muffled footfalls are long past before he begins to crawl.

He works the component free with a pair of pliers, trying not to ding anything up too badly. The HUD doesn’t offer much more than a theoretical wireframe. Helpful, but not precise.

#z1842 joins the rest in the bag. Connor folds the glasses away in their case and cinches the knapsack up tight behind his back. It’s slow, awkward work; his left arm refuses to bend in any meaningful way without a hot flare of pain.

He waits, his arm tucked up against his chest, his good elbow sinking deeper and deeper in the mud. He shifts occasionally so the suction doesn’t pin him down.

He’s studying the slope of discarded bodies he’ll have to scale one-handed to get back to the break in the fence. Pretty grateful now that he’d bothered with the wirecutters and hadn’t tried to climb.

He isn’t expecting the lights behind him, the sound of shouted orders. It’s distant. Someone else’s bad night.

The tinny pop of gunfire makes him jolt. 

Connor runs.

+++

He takes the back stairwell up to avoid Mr. Parland, who’s fond of 3 am cigarette breaks. Drags himself up the stairs, bends and contorts to get his keys out of his pocket with his good hand. 

He lingers on the doormat for a second, the key in the lock. He feels abruptly aware of the mud and long-dried thirium caked on him; under his shirt, in his hair, beneath his nails. His elbow’s swollen and throbbing, tight under his shirt.

He turns the deadbolt and pushes through, leaving a flaking trail of debris in his wake. Shuts the door quickly, following through with the slow ritual of locking up.

The TV’s still on, just as he left it.

The android’s on the couch, just as he left him.

He sets the bag down, awkward and lumpy with the arrangement of stolen parts: a collection of small relays, circuit boards, the softer material of a biocomponent. He doesn’t try to take them out of the bag. He keeps his injured arm at what he hopes is a casual angle and says, “That’s everything, I think. I’m sorry about the mud. I can wash them off, if you need me—”

“I’ll take care of it,” the android says. “Thank you.”

There’s a sincerity to his voice that Connor always finds oddly calming.

Almost familiar, but he can’t place why. He doesn’t know what model Markus is, not even what he was made for. All he has is the name Tina gave him and a handful of empty conversations.

“I think there’s more on you,” Markus says.

Connor stares blankly back for a few seconds before realizing it’s a joke. “Oh. The mud. Yes. I’ll— I’ll go clean up.”

Once the bathroom door’s closed, Connor stands on his bathmat and stares at his grimy face, hair hanging in mud-caked clumps. He thumbs at the split in his lip, a manageable, familiar sting compared to the throbbing in his elbow.

In the ideal world, cleaning up would involve washing the images off with the mud. Scrubbing away the feel of cold plastic sliding under his fingertips.

Empty eyes, staring and glassy.

There are rumors that in a lot of the early pits, they hadn’t run them through the magnetrons.

That a lot of the androids were still alive. Mangled, glitching, crawling things, piled one atop the other. Cannibalizing each other for parts.

He skates his fingers through his clotted hair and fumbles at his jacket, pulling it free with some awkward maneuvering and a quick hiss of discomfort as he tugs the sleeve down his arm. He has to bend in half to peel the tacky shirt off his back and drag it over his head.

There’s no bruises, yet; just the bright blush of pooling blood under the skin on his shoulder, his hip. His elbow’s swollen, but his nightmare thoughts of bone bursting through the skin are ill-founded. Just a weird lump around the joint. Dislocated, he thinks, or maybe just badly sprained.

He drops the shirt straight in the trash. Debates searching ‘ _how to tell if elbow broken_ ’ on his phone, but ultimately he just pokes at the swollen joint a few times, hisses through his teeth and retreats into the shower.

All the hot water does is settle into his bones and throb. He doesn’t know if he wants to sit or stand or just curl up in the tub and wait for the stabbing pain to subside. By the time the hot water starts to taper off, he’s still bearing his forehead into the tile, trying to breathe.

He’s wondering how he’s going to explain why he can’t straighten out his arm on patrol in a few hours.

Wondering - as a particular pang snags him like a thorn, leaves him hanging and breathless - whether he did this for Tina, or for the android she’d dumped on his couch.

All she’d said was, _Keep an eye on him, alright? He doesn’t leave this room._

He’d been out a leg and half an arm; hadn’t even _booted up_ for a solid two days. Connor came home from work and the android was sitting on the couch, staring at him with two-toned eyes.

Connor brought him thirium from the DPD stores. (No one was using it anymore, anyway. All the docks stood empty.) That got Markus up and talking again, watching Connor’s movements with a wary caution. 

He asked what else Markus needed. Markus gave him a list. Tonight’s backpack load had been the last of it.

He doesn’t feel any better or worse for it. He doesn’t feel like he’s done much more than exist, through all of this.

Watched all of it play out, locked in place.

The water’s gone cold.

He shuts the shower off and hobbles his way out, palm on the wall for support. Dries off and slides into a clean shirt, a pair of boxers.

Markus is a few pinpoints of light in the dim kitchen, blue and yellow and the occasional quick flash of red.

Connor can relate. He feels lit up red, a dull heat just beneath the skin.

He slips into the bedroom without a word, sitting on the foot of his bed. He tries to straighten the arm out, and stops with a muted curse when he feels something _grind_.

Swiping at the clinging tears of pain with his sleeve, he stretches out on his side, elbow cradled close. Tries to find sleep somewhere under the grit of exhaustion and the new images rattling around in his head.

Somewhere between the bodies hanging from the streetlights - silhouettes you didn’t see until you were beneath them - and Tina crouched in his bathtub, arms painted in blue. That pinpoint of red reflecting on the tile as she told him it went wrong. It all went wrong.

Now he has images of swatches of plating, half-buried in the mud. Staring faces piled by the thousands.

Too-still, too-perfect bodies, bleached white plastisteel skin going dull under a murky sky.

He hadn’t seen much of the android that threw him. Nothing more than a spark of electric blue under a rough cowl. The red of a badly damaged interior, shining through the gaps in his makeshift clothes. Sharp, feral thing. Nothing left but itself, and a hatred for the things that did this to it.

Markus isn’t much like that, he thinks.

And then he thinks, _You don’t know him at all,_ and stuffs those idle suppositions down where they belong.

He doesn’t hear the door open. Just the squeak of the bedsprings as someone settles on the foot of the bed.

“May I take a look at your arm?” Markus says.

Sounds like something out of a dream. Smooth, rolling tones.

“Don’t worry about it,” Connor mutters, eyes still clenched shut. “I’ll go to the walk-in clinic on the way to work. Say I slipped in the shower.”

“You should,” Markus agrees. “But I think it’s dislocated. You’ll be more comfortable if I put it back into place.”

He blinks at the far wall before pushing his way upright. Markus watches him, expression firmly neutral as he hands him a couple of aspirin. Connor’s not convinced they’ll do much, but he takes them anyway, and accepts the glass of water Markus offers him next.

“Do you have... protocols for this?” he asks. He’s aware he’s holding his arm tucked up against like a kid hiding a scrape, but he doesn’t do anything to change it.

“Yes. This used to be my job.”

Markus reaches out a hand, palm up. 

Connor sets the water down and shifts forward until his knee is nearly brushing Markus’s thigh, extending his left arm as far as it will go. (Not far at all, before he’s clenching his jaw and freezing.)

Markus touches him with only enough pressure to guide his arm how he wants it: elbow bent, Connor’s extended hand clasped in his own. He reaches with his other hand for the elbow, his fingers cool against the swollen skin.

Connor tenses as soon as Markus starts to move: applying a firm pressure to the inside of his palm, pushing the forearm out and over in a slow rotation. He tries not to think about the sudden, brutal strength of the android that had grabbed him in the junkyard. 

Markus doesn’t even look up. Just murmurs, “Let me.”

There’s not much Connor can do to resist, anyway. The hand curled around his elbow is deceptively gentle, but when he instinctively jerks back from that nauseating _grind_ and the sparking build of discomfort, Markus keeps his arm firmly in place. 

He breathes through his nose, tries to focus on the small details - cool, dry skin against his own, and the android’s determined focus.

The pain peaks, his arm lighting up from wrist to shoulder like every nerve has been caught in a tight fist. Connor thinks he cries out, but he can’t hear it past the rising white noise in his ears.

He _feels_ the wet pop of the joint more than he hears it. 

And then-- relief.

His elbow still feels too-warm against Markus’s hand, and now there’s the added discomfort of pins and needles crawling from wrist to elbow, but the pressure is gone, and that throbbing pulse of pain starts to abate with it.

Connor glances up and accidentally meets Markus’s eyes. Mismatched. One green, one blue.

He averts his gaze towards the dresser.

“Does it feel numb?” Markus asks.

“I wish,” Connor blurts out. He’s just as quickly correcting: “It feels better.”

Shuts his mouth before he can say anything else stupid.

Markus pinches each finger in turn. Connor tries not to think about how long his fingers are, and how they move like a musician’s - quick and purposeful. He nods mutely when Markus asks if he can feel it. He feels it in starbursts of light, shocked nerves coming back online. But the noise fades, warmth bleeding back into the skin. 

He cautiously extends the arm. Stiff and still aching, but responsive. It feels more like a torn muscle or a sprain.

“Thank you.”

“You should still get it checked out,” Markus warns. “Make sure nothing’s torn or fractured.”

“Okay.” There should be some finality to that. He should tell Markus that’s enough; he should pull away from the hand still balanced carefully beneath his own. 

But he isn’t. He isn’t pulling away from the knee brushing his, or telling him to go. He isn’t untangling the anxiety that’s building and coiling into something else.

This - all of this - has been shaped around what hasn’t been said.

Markus has seen the uniform, he knows what Connor does. But he hasn’t asked where his loyalties fell during the riots. (Clearly he didn’t do much. He still has a job, after all.)

Connor hasn’t asked about why Markus seems-- different, somehow.

Grieving in a way Tina isn’t. Shouldering some weight distinct from the rest of them. 

It isn’t his place to ask.

He doesn’t ask him to stay, doesn’t know if he can, or _should_ , but his hand is still in Markus’s, and he isn’t moving, and Markus isn’t moving, and he’s murmuring, “I’m sorry, I don’t-- you don’t have to--”

He shuts his mouth when Markus’s hand touches his thigh.

“I don’t mind,” Markus says.

There’s a hundred things he should say. That he doesn’t _owe_ him anything, that he doesn’t want him to think that--

But Markus’s lips meet his. His hand bears down into his skin, and he thinks even the slightest movement of those elegant fingers might have him whining.

Connor reaches to catch the back of his neck. He tastes like nothing; the lingering taste of blood from his split lip and something like mineral water, there and gone on his tongue. Dry skin beneath his palm, the prickle of synthetic hair cropped close.

He doesn’t feel different. 

He could just be another rushed, inelegant hookup.

Connor could believe that, if he could ignore the purposeful confidence of Markus’s hands as he lays him on his back, straddling his hips. A hand tracing up under his shirt, featherlight. Identifying the patches of future bruises and deftly avoiding them.

Just another hookup, tracing his nipple with a light touch, exploring his mouth with a careful tongue. Nearly all of Connor’s attention is on the hand on his hip, burning like a brand. Sliding along the hemline of his boxers, before he’s pausing.

He pulls back, leaving Connor painfully aware of everything - the sweat beading on his skin and his _breathing_ , too loud, too insistent. Markus feels like an echo chamber to his hammering heart. 

Markus hovers over him, damnably calm and damnably unperturbed. He asks, “Alright?”

“ _Yes_ , it’s good, I want you to--” He shifts his legs apart at even speaking this aloud, a hundred dismissed thoughts and daydreams. He’s losing his _mind_ at those steady points of pressure, but he’s still licking his lips and insisting, “You’re sure you want this?”

He tries to stifle his rising breaths as Markus pauses above him in the semi-dark. 

The android studies him. A lingering stare, but there’s nothing unkind or measuring to it. There’s nothing between them. No debts. Barely even names.

The cynical part of him recognizes that they’re formless to one another. _That’s the appeal, isn’t it?_

Markus leans forward, pressing his lips to the sweat beading on his neck. He rises to kiss him again, slow and deep. The salt stings.

“Yes,” Markus murmurs, and smears the blood away from Connor's lower lip with a thumb.

He takes Connor’s wrist and guides it to his hip. Breaking through Connor’s hesitation, encouraging him to touch. 

Feeling the rise and fall of his ribs. Reaching to find that small scuff of plating on his cheek, where the skin hadn't quite reformed. Marveling still that this-- 

This is _real_. Not some fever dream.

His fingers skip, breath hitching when Markus slides his boxers down to his knees, taking him in a firm grip. It’s only fair, taking his own explorations farther south, suppressing his surprise at the heavy weight of his arousal.

Were most androids--?

The thought dissolves as Markus’s hand shifts, easing its way from root to tip. Connor cants his hips, blindly chasing the pressure; but Markus has already moved on, leaving Connor to grind against the soft of his arm while his fingers skate over his balls and down, exploring the cleft of his ass.

As Markus’s attention drifts, Connor clumsily works at his boxers, kicking them free. He focuses on Markus’s pants, next, undoing the fly. He’s still tied up in appreciating the sight when Markus grabs his hips and startles a small noise of surprise out of him, dragging him down and grinding against him.

He moves slow, driving Connor further and further along until he’s sweating and dripping and it isn’t _fair_ \-- He flexes his hand in the bedsheets as he finally gasps, “I want you to fuck me.”

He waits, his breath held tight and stagnant. 

Markus nods. 

Connor straightens up to dig in his nightstand for lube; his knuckles bump a box of condoms in passing, but he realizes there’s no need. He passes the lube to Markus, who studies it with a vague amusement. _Right. Humans._

He rolls onto his knees without much thought. It’s what most of his partners have preferred.

Bears into the mattress, weight on his good elbow - and freezes, as Markus gently touches his hip, rolling him onto his back.

“Is this alright?” the android asks again.

“Yes,” Connor breathes, reaching without hesitation for the ridge of his hip, fitting his palm there. Grounding himself to this ethereal thing. Somewhere under the haze of want he’s thinking, _Kiss me again and a guy starts getting ideas--_

Markus runs a hand down his thigh slowly; studying the lines of him.

Connor watches, enraptured by those fingers again. 

The slow confidence of them, as he pulls Connor’s legs apart, easing his knees up. 

Markus kisses the corner of his mouth once, chaste. He’s been avoiding his lips since he’d wiped away the smear of blood there; but it’s Connor that turns his head and catches him again, exhales slow into the kiss. Feels the cool exhale in return.

Tastes like nothing. Like him; sweat and blood.

And then Connor’s breaking away, hand splaying wide across the shifting muscles of his back as Markus pushes in. He makes a small sound in the back of his throat, a guttural, “ _Oh--_ ” that has Markus pausing, waiting.

He finds the bedsheet with his free hand, gripping hard. Feels his muscles clench and relax around him.

 _Whines,_ as that weight settles in him, as his untouched dick twitches against his stomach. “Please. Markus, please, _fuck me_ \--”

The android nods again. Kisses at the sweat on his neck, again, as he begins to pull free.

It isn’t entirely fair.

He knows that if Markus wants, he can catch every gasp and twitch and moan, can repeat that perfect motion, the hitch and drag across his prostate that has his head tilting back, mouth falling open in soundless want. He can chase the changes in heart rate, the crawling flush creeping down his cheeks, to his chest.

Can push and push and push until he’s sobbing with it.

He can read every piece of him. Taste the galvanic charge of his skin wherever he touches, lips and fingers and tongue.

He can, and he does.

Presses Connor until he’s breaking in half, back arched and grasping desperately at the sheets, at Markus; only dimly aware of the weak, wordless sounds being driven out of him with every thrust.

By the time he’s settling a hand around Connor’s cock again, his skin slick with lube, Connor’s already dripping; it doesn’t take more than a few firm strokes before he’s shaking apart on the discordant rhythm of Markus’s hips, aware only of those pinpoints of pressure - bundled muscle beneath his clutching fingers, a steady hand on his thigh. The low, wounded sound Markus makes as he follows. 

He grips the sheets in a tight fist and unravels.

Lets his mind wash clean, for a while.

+++

They don’t talk about it, after.

He wakes up to an empty bed and a cup of coffee waiting on the kitchen counter. Markus asks if he’ll still go to medical services - demands it, really - and Connor does. Nothing broken, nothing torn.

A few weeks later, he comes home to Markus gone. There’s just a note thanking him, pinned under a bag of conciliatory take-out food from Tina.

Connor doesn’t realize who he is until the broadcasts resume.

More and more of them, coming out on the net. It doesn’t take long for people to confirm that it’s the same skinless android from the Stratford Tower incursion; one Connor had only seen once, a passing glance on the muted lobby TV, before it got censored out of existence.

Mismatched eyes, Connor realizes. And a little scuff on his right cheek that hadn’t quite repaired, interrupting the plasteel shine.

(He sends Tina a curt text about not informing him just _who_ was sleeping on his futon for a month.)

He listens to every word Markus has to say. He hopes along with them. Does what he can, as one beat cop in a city of hidden deviants.

He still thinks about that night, occasionally. The one where the two of them were... nothing, as far as the world was concerned.

Nothing, and everything.


End file.
